Ok, I know I had already written about
the Canal but I had to write another page with complementary information after our visit to the Miraflores Locks.

The possibility of a waterway linking the Atlantic and the Pacific in this region had been well appreciated four centuries before anyone
started to dig. Spain's King Carlos V ordered a survey of the canal route in 1524 but it was presumably decided that cutlasses would not be adequate for the job.

The French started a canal in 1880 under de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, but after
20 years of struggle with the jungle, disease, financial problems and the sheer enormity of the project, they were forced to give up.

In 1903 Panama seceded from Colombia with the help from the USA and after that, Americans and Panamanians signed a
treaty in which the concession for a public maritime transportation service across the Isthmus was granted. The following year the USA purchased the French Canal Company's properties for U$ 40 million and began to dig.

It was a gigantic and hard
task, with the loss of many lives, but finally on August 15th, 1914 the US cargo ship Ancon made the first transit marking the innauguration of what we nowadays know as the Panama Canal.

The Canal entered yet another phase of its History on October
1st, 1979 when the process of handing the Canal to the Republic of Panama began, under treaties signed by Panama's former head of Government, the late General Omar Torrijos Herrera and former US President Jimmy Carter.

The Canao and all of its infra
structure in the former Canal Zone was finally under Panama control at the end of 1999.